E-commerce App Testing Techniques and Approaches

According to a Statista report, between 2019 and 2025, the entire e-commerce software app market would increase by over 1.2 billion USD. This trend is projected to continue in the coming decades, with e-commerce sales hitting 6.5 trillion dollars or around 22 % of retail sales worldwide by 2023.

Source

With such an emerging market, players should leverage different technologies and testing tools to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the mobile apps to offer a seamless UX. Let’s take a comprehensive look at how to go about it. 

Significance of E-commerce Testing

E-commerce testing helps assess, verify, validate, and test e-commerce websites and apps. It mainly checks for functionality, usability, security, compatibility, and performance of the app or website.  Besides that, e-commerce mobile app testing also helps evaluate whether the app conforms to all standards, procedures, and regulations required for secure transactions.

The core objective of e-commerce testing is to ensure:

• All the pages of the e-commerce website are tested systematically, and transactions are entirely validated and secure.
• There is no compromise on any crucial factors such as customer data security, mobile responsiveness, loading time, user experience, etc.
• Testing, validating and verifying that the site or application is secured enough from intruders and cyber hackers.
• That the particular e-commerce application is glitches-free, secure, and user-friendly 
• Whether the application complies with the international standards, regulations, and procedures to reduce cyber security threats. 

Overall, the e-commerce application testing process helps businesses identify loopholes and get them fixed in a short cycle for faster product releases. 

Core Challenges of E-commerce App Testing

• Simulating client data is crucial during testing, as QA specialists need to cover all functionality and work through all the test cases.
• It is a bit challenging to choose automated integration scenarios, technologies, and principles, as the “automate everything” approach will eventually lead you to collapse.
• Compliance with accessibility standards is worth considering, as it ensures that clients from other locations and countries can smoothly interact with your e-commerce app or website.
• Compliance with security guidelines must be followed to secure customer data & integrity. These guidelines must include authenticity, integrity, confidentiality, availability, and encryption policies.
• Applications of the e-commerce sector vary from consumer-to-consumer, business-to-consumer, consumer-to-consumer, business-to-business, or consumer-to-business. All of them represent a dynamic and distinct concept.

Therefore, the e-commerce application testing process can be dissimilar. Any technological shift can bring new challenges for developers and testers. Simply put, testing an e-Commerce app is challenging because e-commerce application test scenarios are complex. With rapid technological changes, sometimes, we find it hard to monitor accurate techniques or tools for testing e-commerce applications. 

However, with BrowserStack cloud infrastructure combined with appropriate techniques or approaches, devs and testers can deliver desired app performance and user satisfaction.

E-commerce Mobile App Testing Checklist

In the severe business of e-commerce mobile app development and testing, creating ecommerce test cases and having a checklist is of prime concern. Let’s look at this quick mobile app testing checklist that needs to be considered.

1. Home Page: The home page is the first-page interface where a buyer lands. Hence home page should be good enough to bear the traffic load. The user-friendly home page/screen empowers the entire mobile app and hence the QA team should scrutinize and test the features of the home page accurately.

2. Search & Navigation: Total revenue in the Mobile App market is estimated to hit US$420.70bn in 2022. Site search & navigation are two key revenue-driving factors extensively used by your visitors to explore any mobile app and make buying decisions. Hence, ensuring they are free of bugs gives a frictionless user experience from one app screen to another.

3. Product Category and Filters: While testing an E-commerce app/ website, the QA team should test all categories as wrong product mapping can make users bounce. Hence validating the products against the detailed category is mandatory.

4. Product Details: Testing the product detail page is critical during performance testing of the E-commerce application. Also, without a good product description page, an e-commerce app is incomplete as buyers will shy away from incomplete information.

5. Checkout and Payment Process: When any system involves the payment process, it becomes serious. As we know, frauds and scams are prevalent in the online market, so, we need to be extra protective measures.

Besides, we can’t put others’ money at stake; the QA team must comprehensively test the payment procedure.

Types of E-commerce Testing Techniques

Since e-commerce applications operate on an international scale, they need to fulfill certain requirements before they can be launched. For this reason, web apps have to go through diverse forms of testing to ensure that every facet of the system works flawlessly. 

Here is a list of e-commerce testing techniques and approaches:

1. Functional Testing to Avoid Post-Launch Issues

Regardless of how well you develop your e-commerce app, errors in your wireframe will always remain that may disrupt your app functionality. Thus, the quality of any application is crucial for customer satisfaction and retention. Functional testing sets the foundation for a well-functioning app, validating that all features work according to requirements.

Important traits that need to be tested include

• Login/ Sign-in system
• Search and filters page
• Order details page
• Coupon codes and Deals 
• Order tracking 
• Shopping cart page
• Checkout page

2. Usability Testing for Smooth Buying Experience

An e-commerce app’s or website’s usability is critical in facilitating users during the purchase. Comprehensive usability testing creates a superior app experience. A shocking 88% of people will not return to a website they had a bad experience with. So, refusing to invest in a mobile-first design implementation can cost far more than one could expect. 

However, Testing every possible device on the market is impossible. Testing on the right devices would be the next best thing.

No matter what the app, mobile usability testing is best done on real devices. Due to the extreme device fragmentation, eCommerce and shopping apps must be tested on a real device cloud like BrowserStack. 

Start Testing on Real Device Cloud

3. Security Testing for Seamless Transactions

The risk of theft, fraud, and security breaches is a real threat to e-commerce apps. No one likes to get stuck on the payments page. So, it is crucial to ensure a safe, smooth, and secure payment process by testing thoroughly. 

Security Testing addresses the following parameters:

• Ensure all supported and secured payment options.
• Verify that all the data exchanges and transmissions between the user’s device and the app server occur through HTTPS protocol. 
• Encryption of the user’s data like credit/debit card details, bank account credentials, and other confidential data should occur over a secured channel. 
• Validate whether there is any information loss during the transmission and ensure that the recovery systems work perfectly in case of any loss.
• Check whether the encryption of the sensitive information is successful and no storage of passwords in the cookies.

With BrowserStack App Live, you can be assured of uncompromising e-commerce app testing security. Pristine devices and browsers are available for everyone, every time. Simply need to sign up, choose the browser-device-OS combination, and start testing to ensure operability.

4. Performance Testing For Optimum Functionality

Slow performance can kill performance even on a web app that gets a great score. That is why performance testing is crucial in SDLC. It guarantees that the e-commerce apps function smoothly across all browsers. 

Types of performance testing include:

• Stress testing
• Load testing
• Volume testing
• Spike testing 
• Scalability testing

With Browserstack Performance Testing, this is painless to accomplish. You can test your app’s performance in the face of real-world situations like 

• Monitoring the app’s CPU consumption for spikes or prolonged excessive usage
• Compare system memory, available system memory, and your app’s memory usage
• Detecting memory leaks in advance and preventing app crashes
• Check device temperature and battery charge percentage to ensure apps consume only the optimal amount of battery
• Achieve maximum efficiency by identifying and eliminating bandwidth bottlenecks
• Profile app performance and behavior over poor network connectivity and fluctuating or throttled network

Just sign up, upload your app, and start testing biometric authentication and device passcode functionalities for added security of e-commerce apps.

5. Cross-Browser Testing for Consistent App Experiences

Last but not least, every e-commerce website needs to be accessed from multiple browsers-OS-device combinations.  The only way to ensure this is to perform end-to-end cross-browser testing across real browsers and devices.

Wrapping Up!

So, as you can see, conducting thorough e-commerce automation testing is vital to reduce bugs and improve performance. Some of the key benefits of E-Commerce mobile app testing are: 

• Enhanced Application Performance
• Compatibility across Browsers
• Secured Application from Vulnerabilities
• Ensures Superior App UX.

With BrowserStack by your side in your product release cycle, your team can test mobile apps on real mobile devices and verify their performance in real-world circumstances.

Instead of setting up and maintaining a massive on-premise device lab, teams and individual testers can simply log in to access 3000+ real Android and iOS devices on the cloud for eCommerce testing.

Try BrowserStack for App Testing